Afghan civilian deaths up sharply, U.N. says

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The United Nations said Tuesday that 1,445 Afghan civilians have been killed so far this year in attacks by insurgents or U.S.- and NATO-led forces - a 40 percent increase over 2007.

Exactly 800 of the deaths, or 55 percent, were caused by Taliban fighters and other insurgents, the U.N. report said. It said that was almost double the 462 civilian deaths attributed to anti-government fighters in the first seven months of last year.

U.S., NATO and Afghan troops killed 577 civilians, or 40 percent, including 395 deaths caused by air strikes, the report said. That was up 21 percent from the 477 deaths that the U.N. said were inflicted by pro-government forces in 2007.

An additional 68 civilians died in cross fire or other incidents for which U.N. officials couldn't determine responsibility, the report said.

The United Nations did not say how its human rights monitors collected statistics on combat deaths, discuss its sources of information or their reliability, or say how it confirmed a death involved an innocent civilian and not an insurgent fighting without a uniform.

President Hamid Karzai has long complained that civilian deaths caused by U.S. or NATO military action undermine his government and the international mission.

The issue was propelled to the forefront of U.S.-Afghan relations when an Afghan commission found that an Aug. 22 U.S.-led operation in the western village of Azizabad killed 90 civilians, including 60 children. That finding was backed by a preliminary U.N. report.

Karzai's spokesman said Sunday that the raid didn't kill "a single Taliban," and that it had strained U.S.-Afghan relations. Spokesman Humayun Hamidzada said the United States acted on false information provided by a rival tribe.

The United Nations said its count includes 92 civilian deaths attributed to the Azizabad operation, although the U.S. is still investigating the incident.

Not only civilian deaths are up. The killing of two American soldiers Thursday raised the number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan this year to at least 113, surpassing the previous yearly high of 111 recorded in 2007.

With violence escalating, Gen. David McKiernan, the senior U.S. general in Afghanistan, said Tuesday that he is fighting the war with too few ground troops. He said the shortage compels him to rely more on air power, at the cost of higher civilian casualties.

The United Nations said 330 civilians died in August alone.

"This is the highest number of civilian deaths to occur in a single month since the end of major hostilities and the ousting of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001," U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said in a statement.

Pillay called for greater transparency in accountability procedures for U.S. and NATO forces involved in civilian casualties.

A record number of U.S. and NATO troops are in Afghanistan - meaning more troops to carry out more missions - and the use of air strikes has spiked this year. There are more than 65,000 international soldiers in Afghanistan, including some 33,000 American personnel.

Still, increasingly violent insurgents were responsible for the majority of civilian deaths, the U.N. stressed.

Many of the Afghans killed were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, when insurgent suicide bombers detonated their explosives or when roadside bombs went off in trying to attack military targets.

But the United Nations also said militants are increasingly targeting Afghans that the insurgents suspect of working with Karzai's government or international military forces. It counted 142 summary executions conducted by the Taliban and their allies.

After the bombing in Azizabad, the Afghan government announced it would review its "status of force" agreement with the United States and NATO and review whether to demand an end to air strikes and operations in Afghan villages.

A U.S. military review found that up to 35 Taliban fighters and seven civilians died in the raid. But after video of Azizabad surfaced showing dead children and dozens of bodies, the United States said it would send a one-star general from the United States to investigate.

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